Act Locally » November 15, 2010

War News Unfit for Print

'There is much less of a focus on the aspects of the leaks that make the U.S. look bad,' says Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

When five news organizations–The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera–were granted access to Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs before they were published online on October 22, only The Times avoided drawing the same conclusions as its colleagues abroad. The Guardian’s coverage featured headlines such as “Secret Files Show How U.S. Ignored Torture” and “How Friendly Fire Became Routine,” while Le Monde was no less dramatic. Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, published a lengthy editorial titled, “Dumb War: Taking Stock of the Iraq Invasion,” which concluded that the Wikileaks documents confirm that the war was a failure.

Meanwhile, The Times’ front-page headline assured us “Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands.” Other American newspapers seemed similarly unimpressed by Wikileaks’ latest publication of nearly 400,000 classified military documents. The Washington Post printed an editorial declaring that the Iraq War Logs offered no new insights.

“It’s an interesting case study in how the U.S. media treats stories compared to their international colleagues,” says Jim Naureckas of New York-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Referring to The Times’ front-page stories on Iran’s involvement in Iraq and sexual assault allegations regarding Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, Naureckas says “there is much less of a focus on the aspects of the leaks that make the U.S. look bad and there is an effort to seek out things in the material that support the official agenda.”

U.S. media coverage of the Iraq War Logs triggered plenty of criticism online, where Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald condemned the Times for its “Pentagon subservient” coverage of the leaks–a criticism seconded by Joel Meares on The Columbia Journalism Review’s blog The Kicker.

The criticism that the press gives too much influence to the military is particularly pertinent to the War Logs, says Naureckas. “One thing that has really characterized the Iraq War and the Afghan War is that the military is seen as the real source of information and analysis,” he says. “You get a more honest appraisal of how the U.S. military views the war, but that’s not a full picture of the war.” After all, he says, the military “is not in the business of reporting the news. The military is in the business of winning wars.”

What happens when the military does report news? The last decade has seen the public discourse about war increasingly shaded by bureaucratic doublespeak like “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, says, “On the one hand, it keeps at a distance ‘the facts on the ground’ and on the other, it’s just a way of suggesting that all of these matters which may be horrifying to the average person are all just the subject of organizational procedure.” In an era when military secrets cannot be taken for granted, Nunberg says that the words journalists, soldiers and generals use not only distance us from war, but obscure its moral consequences.

“Populist intelligence,” as Assange has termed what his organization is dedicated to providing, is a direct challenge to the media-savvy habits of modern warfare.

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This is the most honest and accurate commentary on the decline of our government's values that I have ever read.
Why can't others see through the facade?
The fickle and impatient voters were again fooled. When will we ever learn?
M.G.,Thank you.Posted by Eugene Connolly on 2010-11-24 12:38:42

Naureckas is quoted as saying, "The military is in the business of winning wars.” Hardly. The U.S. military has not won a major war since 1945. You may recall that, in essence, the Roosevelt administration's wartime economic policy was one of massive, systematic government control of the nation's economic activity. During WWII, daily life was characterized by rationing, victory gardens, scrap and fat collection drives, wage and price controls, full employment, and the largest and most rapid expansion of the manufacturing and industrial base our nation has ever experienced, all in support of the war effort. The end results of Roosevelt's economic policies--government intervention in and strict control of "the free market" at almost every level--were the greatest military victories and economic renaissance the world has ever witnessed. Since then, the nation's economy has been completely and fundamentally reorganized. Economic policy is no longer decided by government but by Wall Street. Our nation's unstable and teetering economy is now systematically mis-managed, to use a quaint but accurate term, by Big Business. Revolving doors at the Treasury, the DOD, State, and Homeland Security are the order of the day. The U.S. military, by far the world's most expensive and most sophisticated, no longer fights wars to win them. Only a largely successful mass media psy-ops campaign persuades Americans otherwise. Our elected leaders no longer mobilize the nation to sacrifice for the war effort. Instead, we are advised to "go shopping," even as Wall Street wizards bankrupt the country. Today, our congressional-military-intelligence-industrial-complex manages wars not to win them but to prolong them, to keep the "defense industry" production lines running and the lucrative no-bid contracts coming. The goal is not to win wars, which of course would logically mean reductions in "defense" spending. So many non-"defense" manufacturing jobs have been off-shored--as a direct result of policy (Greenspan, Reagan, Clinton, Rubin, Summers, et al.)--that "defense industry" jobs are essential to the nation's struggling economy, which would collapse completely without them. The goal is to keep the conflicts going at any cost so that those who profit from the death and destruction can continue to rake in the money and increase their political influence. Thus, after nine years in Afghanistan, the world's most expensive, sophisticated, and powerful military somehow cannot seem to defeat rag-tag gangs of mostly illiterate tribesmen who live in mud huts and caves and are equipped only with small arms and improvised explosive devices. And in Iraq, after some seven years of hideously destructive war and budget-busting occupation, the U.S. is still bogged down with no acceptable outcome in sight. Compare the performance and accomplishments of the American people, their government and their military in the years 1941-1950 to their performance in the years 2001-2010, if you dare. Anyone who is paying attention is weeping for our nation, which has come under the control of criminals and spiritually blind fools.Posted by Michael Gillespie on 2010-11-24 10:59:28